I would appreciate if people downvoting this could leave a comment about whether you disagree that these are potentially helpful policies, or if you are under the impression that I am choosing the most visibly supportive people to put on the hot-seat, or something else.
Spencer R. Ericson
Karma: 608
Just scrolling down the Community page and found this older quick take. I wanted to throw in an “agree from personal experience” comment. I wasn’t targeted, i.e., I found EA organically by looking up related terms when I was 22. But I really wish I found it when I was 5-10 years older! I think I jumped the gun financially on some donations and personally-funded projects in ways that made me overly vulnerable and less effective.
I took on some debt to self-fund some of my philanthropy advising and career exploration, and that made an exit from an EA group house and an exit from an EA organization both much more stressful than they otherwise would have been. I naively ignored how my lack of financial power could affect these relationships because I generalized the community as “high trust.” I accepted surprising things in both situations that were very unfavourable medium-term and long-term, because they were short-term safer financially during a period of several major overlapping stressors.
Even though I have a sense of urgency around effective cause areas and I want to move on them, I am making myself develop a stable financial position before I reengage—at least as stable as the median highly-engaged EA.
Frances, thank you SO MUCH for coming forward with this, and for your detailed discussion of how such a prominent organization handled a case like this. I am not sure how many people are unable to write posts like this. I really, really appreciate it.
I am seeing this post a couple months late because I radically stepped back from the EA community in August. As much as this post has shaken me (literally), I am so grateful that it’s here to read and that I got to read it.
On a personal note (which I’ll circle back from), I miss everyone! There was a time last summer that I was bed-bound by a week-long anxiety-driven vasovagal episode that I told everyone was food poisoning. As much as I want to go back to EAGs and Slack channels, my body threatens me with something similar whenever I think about it. (To anyone whose emails I’ve ignored, I’m really sorry!) I even spent almost the entire Vancouver Summit hiding in a locked room, even though I helped host it in a building that’s a second home to me. Like, the keys to that building are on my keychain every day, I have slept in it, I loved so many people at that event… but even there, I couldn’t face anyone who might ask me what I’ve been up to and why it’s not the same as it used to be.
Circling back, I don’t know if you remember me from EAGs, but I remember meeting you “a few Bostons ago” at an afterparty. It’s not just that you’re a ray of sunshine, it’s also that seeing you in a prominent position as a candid young woman gave me hope for what I might be able to do. I hope that energy propagates in the community… but I mostly hope you do really well going forward. Because to me, you’ve been a cornerstone of this community, and I think whichever communities have people like you in them will do good better. So if you have any difficulty engaging with the community in ways that remind you of what happened, I wish you all the healing, and I also know that any other directions you put your energy into instead will blossom.
Hi James S., this is a lovely comment. Please keep me updated on how GWWC’s safeguarding, whistleblowing and harassment policies support and encourage things like seeking accountability and sharing courageously/honestly. I can’t find them on the website very easily anymore, but I’m sure I just misplaced the link.
Could you let all of us know whether GWWC currently participates in any practises like:
external mediation or investigation of discrimination/harassment complaints
transparently discussing any suspected or alleged discrimination/harassment separately with each party to the issue before decisions
discussions with employees from experiences of trauma/marginalization/neurodivergence about how to proactively support them
as well as during any conflicts, asking whether experience with trauma/marginalization/neurodivergence is affecting their experience/communication and what equity would look like from their perspective
trauma-informed external training of supervisors on recognizing signs of mental health crises and referring exclusively to qualified, external support
a policy to flag and prevent internal conflicts of interest, including but not limited to coworkers also being each other’s:
roommates
partners
family members
1-1 peer support providers
an internal policy against NDAs, or at least ones that
prevent a person from bringing forth claim’s with their country’s human rights tribunals
prevent a person from discussing any and all particulars of their situation with a licensed clinical counsellor, doctor, nurse, victim service provider, etc. in their region
never expire
(All of these NDA “not-best practises” are just taken from this proposed bill that I helped petition for at Vancouver Pride a couple of years ago when I was volunteering with the BC Greens under their leader at the time, the sponsor of this bill, Sonia Furstenau.)
(Also inspired by this resolution from the Canadian Bar Association which was carried, overwhelmingly, back in 2023.)
It would be great if you could address these potential strategies for preventing harassment and discrimination in our community.
James, you and Sjir were particularly supportive to me when I left GWWC, and I am very grateful for you both. I continue to structure my giving around the GWWC principles, even though I ended my pledge.
For good measure of course, it would be great to hear from CEA, AIM, and any other large orgs in our community about their policies regarding discrimination/harassment, training and support from external experts in supporting members of marginalized communities, COIs, and NDAs. But just seeing your supportive comment here, I am especially interested in all of us being able to hear about how GWWC models this.
Thanks so much!
Template: Strategic Funding Approach for An Effective Foundation
Hi Peter, I found this old post in my bookmarks! I went through your post history and couldn’t find the time when you clearly became more supportive of x-risk research, but you run IAPS now. I am still sympathetic to a lot of what you say in this old post, so I was wondering if you could describe when you became more supportive of x-risk work and why?
I’ve been in awe of your team these last couple years. Thank you for your great work. It meant so much to me that I got to meet with you personally when I took the pledge and became a GWWC Ambassador in 2022! Best of luck with your next steps.
Thank you for checking it out! I’ll check the settings on this. I haven’t been able to find a way to make this visible yet, and I think the best that Guided Track has to offer might be to click the previous section headings...
Guided moral weights clarification tools: How much do you value saving a life vs. direct giving or increasing wellbeing?
Thanks, I largely agree with this, but I worry that a Type I error could be much worse than is implied by the model here.
Suppose we believe there is a sentient type of AI, and we train powerful (human or artificial) agents to maximize the welfare of things we believe experience welfare. (The agents need not be the same beings as the ostensibly-sentient AIs.) Suppose we also believe it’s easier to improve AI wellbeing than our own, either because we believe they have a higher floor or ceiling on their welfare range, or because it’s easier to make more of them, or because we believe they have happier dispositions on average.
Being in constant triage, the agents might deprioritize human or animal welfare to improve the supposed wellbeing of the AIs. This is like a paperclip maximizing problem, but with the additional issue that extremely moral people who believe the AIs are sentient might not see a problem with it and may not attempt to stop it, or may even try to help it along.
SecureBio—Notes from SoGive
Thank you Philippe. A family member has always described me as an HSP, but I hadn’t thought about it in relation to EA before. Your post helped me realize that I hold back from writing as much as I can/bringing maximum value to the Forum because I’m worried that my work being recognized would be overwhelming in the HSP way I’m familiar with.
It leads to a catch-22 in that I thrive on meaningful, helpful work, as you mentioned. I love writing anything new and useful, from research to user manuals. But I can hardly think of something as frightening as “prolific output, eventually changing the course of … a discipline.” I shudder to think of being influential as an individual. I’d much rather contribute to the influence of an anonymous mass. Not yet sure how to tackle this. Let me know if this is a familiar feeling.
I’m also wondering if the butcher shop and the grocery store didn’t have different answers because of the name you gave the store. Maybe it was because you gave the quantity in pounds instead of in items?
You previously told ChatGPT “That’s because you’re basically taking (and wasting) the whole item.” ChatGPT might not have an association between “pound” and “item” the way a “calzone” is an “item,” so it might not use your earlier mention of “item” as something that should affect how it predicts the words that come after “pound.”
Or ChatGPT might have a really strong prior association between pounds → mass → [numbers that show up as decimals in texts about shopping] that overrode your earlier lesson.
To successfully reason in the way it did, ChatGPT would have needed a meta-representation for the word “actually,” in order to understand that its prior answer was incorrect.
What makes this a meta-representation instead of something next-word-weight-y, like merely associating the appearance of “Actually,” with a goal that the following words should be negatively correlated in the corpus with the words that were in the previous message?
Thank you for your integrity, and congratulations on your successful research into the cost-effectiveness of this intervention!
So true! When I read the 80k article, it looks like I’d fit well with ops, but these are two important executive function traits that make me pretty bad at a lot of ops work. I’m great at long-term system organization/evaluation projects (hence a lot of my past ops work on databases), but day-to-day fireman stuff is awful for me.
Hi Amit, I think people might be downvoting you because they don’t see James’ comment as indicating support for CEA or a similarity in this area between GWWC and CEA.
I’m actually also not sure what part of his comment gave you that indication, but maybe you have some context you can share? I’m not able to weigh in.
Despite the leaf showing your profile is new, I get a hunch from your post history that you have some longer engagement with EA, not that you’re an opp who has come from afar to criticize as much as possible about the movement. If something in your experience with EA has jaded you, I would value hearing your story.
I think at this time, we both come across as passive aggressive towards EA in general. If you’re able to, I would recommend getting someone to review your posts/comments before you post them, so that they come across in a way that’s more aligned with the tone of the forum. I would get feedback on my posts myself, but if I were to share my posts with the people in my life, I would not be able to answer their questions about why I am posting or what I am trying to change. So I am just trying to keep things as positive and indirect as I can. Judging from the karma on my comment a few days ago, I think I’m not really hitting the mark.